Synthetic plastics play a vital role in our daily lives for various applications such as in the food industry, automotive, decoration, textile, entertainment, and others. But did you know that in 2019 alone, a production of 368 million tons was reached? During its manufacture, it generates the emission of carbon and other dangerous gases, not to mention, which take hundreds of years to degrade.
For that reason, great efforts continue to be made to reduce the use of synthetic plastics and promote the use of biobased polymers. These include polymeric materials from renewable sources that can be processed to design products similar to synthetic plastic with the structural and functional properties desired for the applications.
For this reason, the use of materials known as biocomposites, where one of its parts comes from a biological material and the other is commonly a synthetic polymer.
In recent years, the use of natural fibers in biocomposites for different applications has increased. These can be obtained from different sources, such as by-products or waste from the agricultural industry. Among the advantages of using natural fibers are their ecological character, low cost, low energy consumption and density, abundance, they are renewable, sustainable, wide variety, and not to mention that they are environmentally friendly. Therefore, they can be used in different compounds, reducing costs and improving their properties.
Plant fibers can be obtained from leaves, stems, seeds, fruits, roots, grasses, cereal straw and wood. Some of the fibers used are bamboo, banana, coconut, henequén, pineapple, agave, jute, rice, avocado, orange, abaca, sugar cane, and others.
Our Penka products are made with PolyAgave. Which is a biobased composite of AGAVE FIBER and polypropylene, reducing the load of synthetic material. Our products have several advantages, including the circular economy, reduction of CO emissions2 to the environment, which is also a recyclable and reusable material. We invite you to check out our product line!
By: Andrea Zambrano
